Extremely SLOW Powerbook G4

Sounds like the hard drive, although old age would not be the problem.

I would clone to an external drive and run from that to see if things settle down. If you then feel it is the hard drive for certain, it would still be worthwhile replacing it. I use SuperDuper for Cloning/Backup.

Does all of your RAM show up btw?

Joe

Cloning goes hand-in-hand with backing up:

Thanks to that Tuttle guy for:

Start by formatting your external drive. Select the drive in Disk Utility (the uppermost icon related to the drive), then click the Erase button in the upper middle of the ** window. In the new pane, next to Volume Format, choose to format the drive as Mac OS Extended. You don't need to choose the option to journal the volume at this time.

When creating an initial clone, it's always safe practice to write zeros to the target drive. Click on the Security Options button, choose to write zeros to the drive and click Okay. Then click Erase. Writing zeros may take a couple of hours to do on a 300GB drive, but you just need to do it this once. Afterward, just clicking the Erase button will be sufficient unless bad blocks or similar problems develop in the future. Give the new volume a name that is distinct from the name of your PB's volume (i.e. not Macintosh HD1).

Once the drive is erased and formatted, repair permissions on the source drive, launch SuperDuper! or CCC, set the Source and Target volumes and clone.

One note: In CCC, make sure that the only option you select in CCC's preferences is "Make Bootable." If you use SuperDuper!, you don't have to worry about that (though it will ask you if you are sure that you want to erase the target volume. Choose Yes.)

When the clone is finished, select the new volume in System Preferences > Startup Disk and click Restart. When you've booted into the clone, immediately open System Preferences > Desktop & Screensaver and change the desktop picture so you know which volume you're booted from just by looking. Next, open Disk Utility and repair permissions on the cloned volume. After this, you can click on the Enable Journaling button in the Disk Utility toolbar at the top of the window.

After this, shut down your computer. After two minutes, start up your computer, pressing the Option key immediately after the startup chime. This will take you to the Startup Manager screen where you will choose the cloned volume to start from in order to test whether or not it is truly bootable. If it boots fine, go through it and test some apps to see if everything is in order. If all is well, choose the PB's drive in System Preferences > Startup Disk and restart. When you restart, remember to reselect the PB as the startup volume in System Pref's > Startup Disk as well.

Joe

Myself and many others here use one of these:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/eliteclassic

But whatever you get, make sure you get one with the Oxford 911 chipset.
Make sure you get FireWire, so the G4 can boot from it.

Joe

It boils down to quality components and less reported issues. Pretty much, it would be invisible to you. From Eric K:

Make sure you get a drive that has the Oxford 911 chipset and avoid the more common - and cheaper - Prolific chipset. Many Mac users have reported problems with the Prolific chipset and the 911 is much more reliable.

Joe